Nas and DJ Premier are currently gearing up to release their eagerly anticipated joint album, and today (November 25), they dropped some exciting new details of what’s to come. According to a new Instagram post, the project is called Light-Years. They unveiled the cover art, and confirmed that the project will arrive on December 12 via Mass Appeal Records. Needless to say, their fans can’t wait.
Nas discussed the series during an interview with Rolling Stone that was published last month.
Nas & DJ Premier Album
“This series is to encourage [and] inspire hip hop and remind us all [of] the pureness of hip hop,” he said at the time. “I hope that we all can do this together.”
“It’s 1995 all over again,” he continued. “Sometimes I feel like 2025 has that feeling. It’s not going backwards, [it’s] going forward, though. It’s that feeling of urgency, that vibration, the celebration of life and these songs and these albums, what they meant 30 years ago, it’s still thriving right now.”
“Even from younger people, they’re all derivatives of that early sound. And these artists here, from Slick Rick — he is the reason that all of us even have a pen in our hands. You look at him and you think of Mobb Deep, and you think of Raekwon and Ghostface, De La Soul, [it’s] some of the most different, brave, bold, intelligent hip hop music ever made,” Nas concluded. “And of course, we lost some of our brothers along the way, [but] we’re still representing for them and they’re still representing themselves through the series. […] It’s a celebration of a great impact, a standard that they set that we could never forget because it keeps us aiming higher.”